​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Current Steering Committee Members

Prof. Daniella Talmon-Heller

CSoC Director

Department of Middle East Studies

talmond@bgu.ac.il

Talmon-Heller is an associate professor whose research interests include the history and historiography of the medieval Middle East, Islamic thought and practice, and comparative religion. She is the author of: Islamic Piety in Medieval Syria: Mosques, Cemeteries and Sermons under the Zangids and Ayyubids, (Leiden 2007) and Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East: An Historical Perspective (Edinburgh 2020), and co-editor (with Katia Cytryn-Silverman) of Material Evidence and Narrative Sources: Interdisciplinary Studies of the History of the Middle East (Leiden 2014). Currently, she is working on a research project entitled "Sacred Scriptures as Sacred Objects:  The Material Qurʾan and Torah in the Medieval Middle East" (supported by a grant of the Israel Science Foundation). 

​Prof. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal

Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought

Vice President for Global Engagement at BGU

michal.barasher.siegal@gmail.com

Bar-Asher Siegal's work focuses on aspects of Jewish-Christian interactions in the ancient world, and compares early Christian and rabbinic sources. She was an elected member of the Israel Young Academy of Sciences, and served as visiting professor at both Harvard Law School and Yale. Her first book is Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2013; winner of the 2014 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award). Her second book is Jewish-Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity: Heretic Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2019; finalist, National Jewish Book Award, 2019).

​Prof. Jackie Feldman

Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Yaakov and Poriah Avnon Chair in Holocaust Studies

Head of the Esther and Sidney Rabb Center for Holocaust Studies

Jackiefeld@gmail.com

Feldman's research interests are pilgrimage and tourism, anthropology of religion, Holocaust memory, ethnographic writing, heritagization and comparative study of museums. In addition to numerous articles in scholarly journals, he has published two books: Above the Death-pits, beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Holocaust Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (Berghahn, 2008), and A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land: How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli (University of Indiana, 2016). His current research project, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG) is "From the Era of the Witness to Digital Remembrance: New Media, Holocaust Sites and Performative Memory". This research examines how structures of authority, place memory, and social solidarities change as a result of widespread digital technologies and social media.

Prof. Nimrod Hurvitz

Department of Middle East Studies

nhurvitz@bgu.ac.il

Hurvitz has published about Muslim law, courts of law, politics of theology and modern and medieval socio-religious movements. His research interests are Islamic movements in the Middle Ages and Modern Times. His book The Formation of Hanbalism, Piety into Power, (Routledge 2002) was translated into Arabic in 2011. Together with Eli Alsheikh he published the book Making Sense of Muslim Fundamentalisms: The Clash Within Islam (Routledge 2020).

Dr. Peter S. Lehnardt

Department of Hebrew Literature

peterl@bgu.ac.il

​Dr. Uri Z. Shachar

Department of General History

urisha@bgu.ac.il

Shachar's studies explore the History of cultural exchange between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Late Middle Ages. His book Pious Belligerence: Dialogical Warfare and the Rhetoric of Righteousness in the Crusading Near East was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2021. He is spending the academic year of 2024-2025 as a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

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Prof. Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner

Department Head of Jewish History

shohamst@bgu.ac.il​

​Shoham-Steiner is a historian specializing in Medieval Jewish History. Between 2018-2021 he served as the head of the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters (CSOC) at BGU. His research focuses on t​he social aspects of Jewish history with a special interest in social information that can be extracted from rabbinic source material from medieval Western Europe. His first book published originally in Hebrew titled:  חריגים בעל כורחם: משוגעים ומצורעים בחברה היהודית באירופה בימי הביניים (מרכז שז"ר: ירושלים 2007) was published in also in English under the title: On the Margins of a Minority (Wayne State University Press: Detroit 2014). He edited a collected essays volume titled: Intricate Interfaith Networks: Quotidian Jewish Christian Contacts in the Middle Ages (History of Daily Life 5-Brepols; Turnhout 2016). His second book is titled: Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe (Wayne State University Press; Detroit 2020). His new book  researching the medieval Jewish community of Cologne aided by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) is forthcoming. 

Prof. Yana Tchekhanovets

Department of Bible Studies, Archeology and the Ancient Near East

yanatchk@bgu.ac.il

​Tchekhanovets is an archaeologist specializing in late antique archaeology and Christian communities of Byzantine Palestine. Her research focuses on various aspects of early Christianity of the Holy Land, with a special interest in monasticism and pilgrimage. She is the author of The Caucasian Archaeology of the Holy Land: Armenian, Georgian and Albanian communities between the 4th and 11th centuries CE. (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Jerusalem: Excavations in the Tyropoeon Valley (Givati Parking Lot): The Byzantine and the Early Islamic Periods (with D. Ben-Ami), Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2020, Russian Excavations near the Holy Sepulchre Church in Jerusalem: Sources, Discussion, and Modern Interpretation (with L. Belyaev and K. Vach), Moscow: Institute of Archaeology RAS, and numerous scientific articles. Tchekhanovets ​directed several archaeological excavations in Jerusalem and is currently directing the archaeological project at Nessana, focused on the archaeology of early Christian pilgrimage.

Prof. Judith Weiss

Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought​

weissj@bgu.ac.il

Weiss studies medieval Jewish Kabbalah and Renaissance Christian Kabbalah. Her research focuses on the synchronic context in which Kabbalistic texts were produced, particularly the shared cultural discourse between Christians and Jews in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. She has published three books on the Kabbalistic thought of Guillaume Postel and a fourth book, in collaboration with Yehuda Liebes, on Egidio da Viterbo's treatise "Scechina." Two major projects she is currently working on concern the broader cultural discourse in which Sefirotic ideas about feminine dimensions in the Godhead were developed, as well as the historical evolution of Sefer Yetzirah.

​Past Members:

​Prof. Cana Werman

Former Department Head of Jewish History

cana@bgu.ac.il 

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Prof. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (Nono)

Former Department Head ​of Jewish History

nono@bgu.ac.il​